


Words Become Superfluous

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: a certain ability to recognise objects under our noses [5]
Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-10
Updated: 2015-01-10
Packaged: 2018-03-06 23:47:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3152855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinko knows she is lucky in her accidental love match, and she tries to live up to it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Words Become Superfluous

**Author's Note:**

> Cass inspired this, so thanks, Cass. :)

            Shinko has never asked for very much. She lives her life in the spaces between may and want, and accepts the graces she is given with as much patient gratitude as she can find. Sometimes - befriending a young Eastern girl with broad shoulders and broader dreams, gaining a royal husband in Tortall and losing a life of servitude to the fiend who would have been her mother-in-law, discovering that her fiancé has a family ready to love her and a country ready to like her - gratitude comes more easily than other times.

 

            She almost does not know what it is to be glad of something, and it takes her by surprise. She is thankful to have Yuki’s warmth and daring, Haname’s cool watchfulness, but she would never ask for these things if she were not high in her uncle’s favour and it were not safe to give them, and she knows that only Yuki would offer. But when Roald looks at her with something new and bright in his eyes and offers to take her to the royal library, to borrow all the books she cares for on Tortallan history and customs, then she feels a sudden vivid happiness bubbling up inside her that she hardly knows at all. For all her early training, she cannot help the answering brightness in her eyes or the instinctive clasp of her fingers when he touches the tips of his to hers, casually, shyly, as if by accident.

 

            One thing false, one thing true, one thing that is both: she never hoped for love, she never expected love, and not many people have been kind to Shinkokami.

 

 

            (“It was not proper,” she tells Haname later, and she is ashamed.

 

            “The rules are different here,” says Haname.)

 

 

            He takes her riding in the Royal Forest. He shows her Queen Lianne’s garden, and invites her to make use of it whenever she needs to feel at peace. He takes her down to the Riders’ Mess one noisy summer evening when they can go unnoticed dressed in plainer clothes, puts a cup of cider into her hands and introduces her to the grizzled veterans who were raw recruits when he was besieged in Pirate’s Swoop. He dances with her as often as he may at the balls and parties given in her honour, attends on her courteously, rides beside her as frequently as Lady Eitaro will allow him to. He gives her compliments that she can believe. He shows her every distinguished attention and invites her into his life with no reservations.

 

 

            (“I don’t know how to repay him,” she protests to Kel, half-embarrassed, half-overjoyed, hiding it all under a mask of restrained maidenly confusion.

 

            “He doesn’t want you to repay him,” Kel says, wincing and shifting on her newly healed broken ribs. “He only wants you to be happy.”)

 

 

            Roald is put into the lists for a practice joust. Lianne explains to Shinko that it is a thing the heir to the Crown must do sometimes but not too often, and that Roald’s overactive sense of honour leads him to do it as often as prudence will allow. Shinko listens, and chooses a scarf from her wardrobe, thin sky-blue silk bordered with red trim, a very different blue to Roald’s eyes but one she favours in her dress. She has grasped this much, from Kel’s painstaking explanation of jousting: a betrothed should have his lady’s favour. This is something she can do for Roald, this is something she wants to do for Roald – this is something she does not even consider _not_ doing. She writes a note that is as discreet as she can make it – _for your joust tomorrow; I shall be in the stands, and wish you luck_ – seals it with the ring Roald unofficially gave her, a device that is only partly Conté, that is otherwise all her own, and gives it to Lianne.

 

            Lianne’s clever hazel eyes widen, and she smiles spontaneously. A strange thing on this most solemn of Thayet’s daughters, a thing Alan of Pirate’s Swoop most often coaxes from her.

 

            Shinko wonders if Roald would consider supporting Lianne and Alan’s betrothal in four or five years, when the time comes.

 

 

            (“That was well done,” Vania tells her when Roald comes away from his joust victorious. The little girl is bouncing in her seat. “Look at him, see how happy he is.”

 

            Shinko looks. She does not expect a child like Vania to notice, necessarily, but she is happy too.)

 

 

            Until now, Roald has confined himself to chaste kisses on her knuckles, quiet chivalrous things that are expected; sometimes, in the few more private moments they have managed to steal, kisses on her fingertips, her palm. He always makes it clear to her, in his calm way, that she is lovely and loveable, and he is falling in love with her.

 

            She hopes she is similarly clear in return. When he underwent his Ordeal, she lay awake all night for fear the Chamber’s door would open on Roald’s mangled corpse, and he would die without knowing that she is almost certain that she loves him, and that he brings her joy. Her mother told her to expect joy only in her children and the successful completion of her duty, but Roald approaches joy as if it is her birthright, something she is owed for being alive, and he gives, gives, gives. It would be a sad thing if she were only to take. She offers him what she can, the stories of her childhood she can bring herself to tell him, lore from the Isles, her sketches of her home country and Yamani poetry, some of which she has written herself. She is an expert in distilling sentiment and encoding it, but when she writes poems to Roald she worries that her codes are too hard to break.

 

            She never worries more than she is worrying now, when Thayet has conspired to find her and Roald a quiet place in which to say their goodbyes before the war, and Roald kisses her cheek and moves off so swiftly that she fears he thinks she didn’t like it.

 

            Tortallans say that deeds are worth a thousand words, and though she recoils instinctively from what she has always been told she must not do even with her betrothed until the wedding vows are said, she knows that is only practice, and not her true feelings.

 

            Shinko steps forward and kisses him on the lips.

 

 

            (Kel writes a letter to Yuki as they are travelling north, and says that Neal is sulking to be apart from his fiancé, but that Roald is even worse.

 

            Shinko takes the hint, damns the proprieties, gleefully consigns Lady Eitaro’s dictates to yesteryear, and writes to Roald. Receiving his replies makes her happier than she dares to say aloud.)

 

 

            The wedding is brief and charming. Shinko does not hesitate when she speaks her marriage vows, but she would not have done that anyway. There are some bawdy comments. Shinko rises above them and so does Roald. They are expected. This is expected.

 

            This is nothing Shinko was not told to prepare for, except that she was not told she would like to be Roald’s wife, unless she was to like the prestige, the honour. Liking Roald himself never came into it, in theory. In practice, Shinko realises, while Roald stands close to her and plainly aches to come closer but tells her that they don’t have to do anything that they don’t want to, that he’ll die before he hurts her, that she has only to say the word and he will do exactly as she pleases, liking Roald himself is everything.

 

 

            (“I love you,” Shinko finally admits, and takes Roald’s pliant hands and draws him that little bit closer.

 

            “I am glad,” Roald says, and she lets joy seep into her eyes, to match that shining from his.)


End file.
